THE OCEAN’S OFFSHORE ENVIROPRENEURS profits, better An Upwelling of PERC-trained Innovators wages, and Quietly Replenish the Sea contribute more back to society BY JAMES G. WORKMAN through tax If ecological gains come from placing value on natural revenues and resources, and value comes through voluntary trade, and fees for science trade requires secure property rights.... From where do and monitoring. property rights come? In fact, if the More appropriately: from whom? United States The answer points to a rather obscure and unglamorous— established yet emphatically important—cadre of PERC restorative catch Enviropreneur Institute alumni who have sought and shares found ways to unlock the vast potential of the wild. These nationwide it people don’t launch business ventures for nature or set up could generate green enterprises. They don’t buy or sell outdoor products $31 billion and or contract for environmental services. Instead, they pry create 500,000 open opportunities for others. jobs, while “meeting our national goal of rebuilding and More specifically, they devote careers to fencing off living sustaining” all fish stocks, said former assistant Administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service, portions of the ocean. They replenish marine life and Eric Schwaab. Does his name ring a channel marker bell? diversity to robust health. And they do so by establishing tenure-based programs of transferable quotas of fish: a It should. He was a 2003 PERC enviropreneur. diverse portfolio of management systems now commonly PERCREPORTS.ORG | SUMMER 2014 | 7 known as catch shares. 6 | PERCREPORTS.ORG | SUMMER 2014 Schwaab is far from a guvmint-bashing libertarian. The urban Democrat from liberal Baltimore spent decades in state agencies and park police before joining the Obama A catch-share fishery operates by establishing an annual Administration as a high-ranking official who oversaw “total allowable catch” with portions of the limit divided among participants. With a secure privilege to the total policymaking and enforced federal regulations to protect coastal environments. Yet there, working long hours behind catch, fishers or fishery associations have the ability to the scenes, he aligned private profits with public interests, catch a certain amount of fish each year. This system ends the insanity of a reckless, dumb, wasteful, and frenzied embedded marine tenure access rights in national policy, and boosted future prospects of fishers and fish. Schwaab open-access “race for fish.” achieved far more to secure free market environmentalism First in theory, then in practice, scholars in economics and from inside the Beltway than a Tea Party protester outside political science from H. Scott Gordon to Elinor Ostrom to of it. Don Leal have long shown the transformation that occurs He hardly accomplished this change alone. Help—both at when fishing communities gain secure, exclusive rights to a home and abroad—came from other alumni. If Harriet portion of the marine resources they harvest. Beecher Stowe was, in Lincoln’s words, “the little woman The alchemy is dramatic and fast. The value of the fish left who wrote the book that made this Great War,” Pamela in the sea becomes apparent. Ensuing ecological benefits Baker was the little marine biologist who wrote the letters generated by catch shares include less waste, cleaner and pamphlets that triggered a catch-shares revolution in harvests, faster recovery, gentler gear, fewer impacts, the Gulf of Mexico. After a summer at PERC in 2004, higher- quality products, and a reduction in the amount of Baker sharpened her enviropreneurial tools to build a unwanted and unintentionally captured animals, known as coalition of Gulf reef snapper fishers until a regional bycatch. council approved rights-based quotas. Economic payoffs are equally powerful: By catching fewer fish over longer seasons, safer fishing practices earn higher That system went live in 2007. “Everyone was holding Her reference to a customized, well- designed catch-share their breath,” recalled Baker, “wondering, ‘What’s going to system was far from hypothetical. A step-by-step “here’s- happen now?’ It was eerily quiet.” Days then weeks went how- to-bake-a-perfect-catch-share” cookbook really does by. The world didn’t come to an end. Finally, someone exist, bound up with dozens of proven recipes from Chile called up Baker and said, “You know, it’s just working. to Alaska and Spain to Japan. And Kate Bonzon is the People are just out fishing. The overall limit was smaller PERCREPORTS.ORG | SUMMER 2014 | 9 than expected, but individual operating costs went down... revenue went up, and so hundreds of fishers made more money catching fewer fish.” 2003 enviropreneur who wrote it, along with several other related manuals, which are now marketed to the world. Americans weren’t the first to collaborate for a national catch-shares policy. That honor belongs to the Kiwis. John After a summer at PERC, Bonzon went on to develop a Willmer arrived in Bozeman in 2005 as a researcher and nonprofit lending institution to smooth fishermens’ scary returned home to New Zealand as a well-equipped and financially painful transition from open- access enviropreneur. As a policy analyst for the New Zealand regulation to a catch-share system. She then assembled and Seafood Industry Council, he worked closely with led a team—which, in the interest of full disclosure, government and environmental NGOs to improve the includes your correspondent—who transform small scale, value and integrity of wild- capture fisheries, “integrating commercial, and recreational fisheries globally. As an environmental, authority on rights-based systems, cooperatives, and Territorial Use Rights to Fisheries, she knows what will or 8 | PERCREPORTS.ORG | SUMMER 2014 won’t perform. Performance outcomes involve moret han economic social, and economic goals” and making sure private metrics. Ecologically careful, scientifically sound, and funding helped fund the science behind setting appropriate socially inclusive design can make or break a developing catch limits. world’s fishery, noted Mark Gibson, class of 2012, who Catch-share policies are controversial even in well- helped strengthen property rights in governed and affluent nations with a long history of Latin American fisheries. To unlock a lasting market you property rights. So what happens farther afield, or further must build in long-term resource health, take community down the scale of the human development index? What do needs into account, and plan bycatch measures to ensure you do in Indonesia, let alone socialist Cuba? diversity and abundance of non-commercial species. Funny you should ask. Daylin Muñoz- Nuñez, a marine Fred Sondheimer, class of 2013, is building on Gibson’s scientist who worked for the Cuban Ministry of Science, lessons, especially in Ecuador, to increase stewardship Technology and Environment, applied her incentives for shrimp and finfish harvesters. Both embrace enviropreneurial skill set to coordinate solutions for key conservation markets, but as a practical means, not an fisheries in Mexico, Belize, and her home country of Cuba. ideological outcome. “Catch-share programs and other Further offshore, she advanced the tri-national rights-based management programs can be excellent tools collaborative management of shark fisheries in the Gulf of for improving social well-being and ecosystem health,” Mexico, using innovative market- based tools that were maintains Gibson, “but they’ve got to be designed right.” modeled after catch shares. You start to detect linkages between these policy Her fellow 2011 enviropreneur Jingjie Chu works to scale enviropreneurs. The findings of one here inform the up local lessons by encouraging agencies in places such as actions of a second there; risks taken by a third make room Vietnam, China, and Myanmar. “Rights-based fishery for a fourth to negotiate with regional officials. That helps management works and a well-designed catch-share system a fifth to scale a national policy, or a sixth build an customized to the local culture and history will work even institutional program that empowers a seventh to go in underdeveloped countries,” argues Chu, a natural farther offshore, bringing order to the largest and yet resource economist in the Global Program on Fisheries at increasingly least tragic commons on earth. As each one the World Bank, which aims to meet the ambitious goal of makes waves, they collectively exert a tidal pull on marine having 50 percent of global fisheries under catch-share politics, moving fisheries in progressive directions. management in ten years. 10 | PERCREPORTS.ORG | SUMMER 2014

That’s the paradox of their silent upwelling. We snorkel out http://perc.org/articles/saving-ocean-fisheries on reefs teeming with biodiversity. We press the firm, fresh meat on ice at a fish market. We admire the black ink on the balance sheets of commercial harvesting businesses. We celebrate all these visible gains from conservation markets. Yet all too often we ignore or downplay the human infrastructure, the boring incremental policy work, and the secure foundation on which they stand. That’s a mistake. You find neither freedom nor fish where governance is weak and institutions absent. Like fishing nets, or the Internet, peer-to-peer network bonds may be invisible, but without them progress is impossible. Fishers look past the whitecaps to appreciate the currents and habitat contours deep beneath the waves. That’s where energy becomes life. So next time you order a king crab sushi roll, or take home a grouper or halibut steak for the grill, or grab a Filet-O- Fish at McDonald’s, give thanks to the fishers who harvest the wild. But then take a moment to recognize those people quietly working below the surface to ensure ocean harvests endure: the men and women who are literally rewriting the law of the sea. http://perc.org/perc-reports/volume-33-no1-summer-2014 JAMES G. WORKMAN, PERC Enviropreneur Alum ’05, is a pioneer in utility- based conservation markets, wrote the award-winning book Heart of Dryness: How the Last Bushmen Can Help Us Endure the Coming Age of Permanent Drought, and is co-author with Amanda Leland of the forthcoming book, The Quiet Sea Change: How America’s Hunter-Gatherers Are Transforming the Rules of the Wild. PERCREPORTS.ORG | SUMMER 2014 | 11 http://perc.org/perc- reports/volume-33-no1- summer-2014